


By Any Other Word

by Lassarina



Category: Final Fantasy XII
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Mindfuck, Remix, Sensory Deprivation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-20
Updated: 2011-03-20
Packaged: 2017-10-17 03:53:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/172623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lassarina/pseuds/Lassarina





	By Any Other Word

**Author's Note:**

  * For [penny](https://archiveofourown.org/users/penny/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Rendition](https://archiveofourown.org/works/156386) by [penny](https://archiveofourown.org/users/penny/pseuds/penny). 



If Vossler yet lives, she is going to execute him with her own bare hands.

She paces the cell on the _Shiva,_ three steps across and three steps back, spinning tightly on her heel like a soldier on the parade-ground. It is far too small for the movement to feel satisfying—naught is satisfying when caged in bars of steel—but her choices are this or sit passively, and she is not one for passivity.

The scrape and ring of boots outside her cell door comes just a moment too late for true warning; by the time she has spun toward it and braced for battle, the Disable spell strikes her full in the face, and renders her body nearly useless. She can scream obscenities at them—to hell and gone with her royal dignity—but can do nothing physically save walk enough to save herself the humiliation of being dragged like a sack of corn.

She is taken off the _Shiva_ and into a building; by the lack of ornamentation on the stone walls, with narrow corridors sharply bent, she takes it for a prison. Let them imprison her, then. She is Princess Ashelia B'Nargin of House Dalmasca, and she will not be broken.

She cannot fight them right now, but she can hold her head high and her back straight as a princess ought. To judge the breed by those who serve in Rabanastre, Archadian soldiers are easily influenced and distracted; she will wait until they forget what they ought not, that she is a warrior as well as a princess, and she will be gone. It may be that the orphans and the sky pirates will see some profit in lending her further aid, but she will not rely on them. She relied on Vossler, and look where that has brought her.

They guide her down several long flights of stairs and lead her into a cell. When they leave and close the door, everything goes completely black. She raises her arms slowly—the drag on them from Disable making it agonizingly hard to do so—and cautiously feels around her head, but there is none of the sticky-damp cloud that suggests a Blind spell. She must be deep underground to make it so dark, though she finds it odd that they would either leave her unguarded or leave her guard no torch.

Time drags by, and slowly the Disable loosens its grip on her. The enforced idleness grates on her; she is not Immobilized and could pace, but she dares not when she is unsure of the dimensions of this cell. Injuring herself out of impatience would ill serve her.

She vents her impatience in curses, calling down every doom she can think of upon Vossler. After a time, her throat begins to ache with the exercise of her voice; she pauses briefly to let it recover, but talking is a way to measure time, so she measures it in beats like her heart. If she focuses on the words, the darkness is not quite so all-encompassing.

When even her imagination begins to fail her, she begins to make demands. "I am Ashelia B'Nargin Dalmasca," she tells the empty darkness, "and I demand to speak to Vayne Solidor." Even saying the name makes her flesh creep, a sickening twist wrapping its way around her stomach, but she is a princess and will be treated according to the Accords. She repeats her demands, quotes the Accords from memory, and yet the guards do nothing.

She adds it to her list of grievances against Archades. When she learns who commands this prison, she will see him or her prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. She knows the Accords by heart—every royal heir does—and this sort of treatment is accounted torture. She is of royal blood, and the Accords explicitly forbid this.

She trades off, cursing Vossler and the Archadians in equal measure. "I will cut out your heart and leave your bones to bleach in the Estersand! Do you hear me, Vossler?" she shouts. She makes other threats. Her voice grows ragged. At last it gives out, and the silence and the darkness bear down on her.

She reassures herself with silent recitation of the Accords. A prisoner is to be given rations every twelve hours, be she princess or peasant. A guard will have to come, and with him, light and sound. It cannot be too long now.

A scraping sound breaks the silence. She freezes. "Who's there?" she demands, and her voice cracks like a twelve-year-old boy's. A bottle makes a distinctive clink against the stone.

There is a sharp clack, and she reaches for the sound. Made clumsy by her blindness and the lingering effects of Disable, she knocks the bottle over, and has to carefully search for it, trying to gauge its position by the sound it made as it rolled. At last she finds it, feels the shape and the size and guesses it to be one of the ration bottles that soldiers carry in case of truly dire straits.

To cover the sinking terror that grips her, she forces her voice to functionality once again. "I know you're still out there. I am Ashelia B'nargin Dalmasca and demand to see Vayne Carudas Solidor."

Silence. She drinks the potion, because despite its foul taste it will soothe her throat and give her strength, and then hurls the bottle against the door. Even it refuses her the simple courtesy of shattering.

She waits, but there is no response. "Release me," she commands.

Still nothing.

Time slides by; she tries to keep track by singing the liturgy of Kiltia silently to herself, but her mind jumps ahead by several beats quite often, overlapping the verses, and it is an imperfect measure at best. She tries to count her heartbeat, but it is irregular even in the silence, even when she sits perfectly still and wills her breathing to precise evenness, in-two-three-four out-two-three-four. When that fails, she starts repeating her name to herself, aloud, in a hoarse whisper. She feels around the floor until she finds a small fragment of stone, and scrapes her true name into the floor blindly. _Ashelia B'Nargin Dalmasca._ She is surprised how hard it is to form the letters blind; she nearly never looks when she must write her name. Perhaps she is out of practice. There has been little room for her name, these past two years.

Vossler made it so. She bares her teeth at nothing, devises new deaths for him. It is his fault she is here. If the Archadians have not killed him, she will do it herself. She will carve her name into his chest a letter at a time with his own sword.

 _Ashelia Ashelia Ashelia Ashelia Ashelia Ashelia_ How did she never notice that her name is sibilant like the snakes that populate the Estersand? But snakes make her think of Solidor—the coiled dragons of their crest have ever seemed more serpentine to her—and that she will not do. She will hate them, but will not use them as her touchstone. She is better than that. She is Dalmascan.

She goes back to counting but loses her place at five hundred and must start again. Tears prickle her eyes. She will not cry.

"Amalia."

She jerks her head up so fast it twinges a muscle in her neck, and she stifles the sound of pain, but not the indrawn breath. "Ashelia," she snaps back, though it is a poor display of defiance when she can scarcely speak.

"No. _Amalia._ That knight has ruined you."

"Vossler!" Her voice trembles. She loathes it for its weakness, as she loathes herself for the weakness of trusting a traitor. _Son of Dalmasca?_ Son of treason. She will kill his entire family line.

"Remember your first meeting. He said you were a ghost."

"No. I was a child. My father knighted him. My father, the King of Dalmasca!" She jumps to her feet, her boots scraping against the stone. "You're just some Archadian bitch trying to change things in my head."

The voice, terrifyingly like her own, chuckles. "I may be a bitch, but I'm you, Amalia, the part of you that knows Ashelia B'nargin Dalmasca is dead."

"No!" She strikes the wall. Her hand aches, in time with her pounding heartbeat. She focuses on it. It keeps the time, however irregularly.

It is not the first time she has struck a wall. Suddenly, viscerally, she is overcome with the memory. She went to his funeral, grieved for him publicly in a black veil as she should, and as soon as she was in her room she sent her maids away and beat on the wall until her hands were bruised and swollen, sobbing his name and crying for the child she'd lost in pain and blood two days prior. Cura had mended her body, but her heart was another matter entirely. Then, she had counted her heartbeats in the pain in her hands just as she does now.

The silence is unnerving. She scrapes her boot on stone to break it, but that will tire her. Should she sleep? She is irrationally afraid she will never wake up, that she will hear that voice even in her dreams.

"Rasler," she whispers. "I miss you. I love you." She clenches her hand to feel the wedding band dig into her flesh.

"You are Amalia." That damned voice again.

"Get out of my head! You're not real." She clenches her fists until her nails, kept short enough for sword-work, dig in hard enough to feel the burn of broken skin, the faint itchy trickle of blood.

"You're seeing ghosts." She _knows_ that voice, has used it herself. That is her attitude of command. It is _hers._ "Do you see me, Amalia? _I_ am Ashelia B'nargin Dalmasca, dead from my own hand. _You_ are a nomad from the Giza Plains."

"No. No no no no! I'm..." For a sickening, horrifying moment she loses the thread of her own name. "I'm Ashe." She makes her voice firm, despite how scared she is.

She is greeted with naught but silence.

She sinks down onto the floor, feels the cold stone painfully hard against her knees, and tries to write her name again. The darkness is suffocating. Her hands will not form the letters.

"I'm Ashe." She repeats it to herself so often the syllables blur into pointless sound. The letters become meaningless angles and curves, signifying nothing.

"I'm Amalia."


End file.
